nk him in person.

The colonel was not unmoved by this frank and grateful letter, and he
knew perfectly well what reward he might claim from her gratitude. Had
the letter come a few weeks sooner, it might have had a different
answer. But, now, after the first pang of regret, his only problem was
how to refuse gracefully her offered hospitality. He was sorry, he
replied, not to be able to join her house party that summer, but
during the greater part of it he would be detained in the South by
certain matters into which he had been insensibly drawn. As for her
thanks, she owed him none; he had only done his duty, and had already
been thanked too much.

So thoroughly had Colonel French entered into the spirit of his yet
undefined contest with Fetters, that his life in New York, save when
these friendly communications recalled it, seemed far away, and of
slight retrospective interest. Every one knows of the "blind spot" in
the field of vision. New York was for the time being the colonel's
blind spot. That it might reassert its influence was always possible,
but for the present New York was of no more interest to him than
Canton or Bogota. Having revelled for a few pleasant weeks in memories
of a remoter past, the reaction had projected his thoughts forward
into the future. His life in New York, and in the Clarendon of the
present--these were mere transitory embodiments; he lived in the
Clarendon yet to be, a Clarendon rescued from Fetters, purified,
rehabilitated; and no compassionate angel warned him how tenacious of
life that which Fetters stood for might be--that survival of the
spirit of slavery, under which the land still groaned and
travailed--the growth of generations, which it would take more than
one generation to destroy.

In describing to Judge Bullard his visit to the cotton mill, the
colonel was not sparing of his indignation.

"The men," he declared with emphasis, "who are responsible for that
sort of thing, are enemies of mankind. I've been in business for
twenty years, but I have never sought to make money by trading on the
souls and bodies of women and children. I saw the little darkies
running about the streets down there at Carthage; they were poor and
ragged and dirty, but they were out in the air and the sunshine; they
have a chance to get their growth; to go to school and learn
something. The white children are worked worse than slaves, and are
growing up dulled and stunted, physically and mentally